Water desalination and sustainable energy harvesting are among the greatest challenges of our society, and nanofluidics offers promising solutions to address them. Nanofluidic energy conversion systems rely on electrokinetic (EK) effects, which couple different types of transport (hydrodynamic, electric, ionic, thermal…) at interfaces. EK effects are sensitive to the molecular detail of interfaces, and should thus depend on their physical chemistry. Yet the possibility to couple surface reactivity and EK transport to enhance the performance of nanofluidic devices has never been studied to the best of our knowledge.

Here we explore these couplings in order to design innovative nanofluidic systems for sustainable energies, focusing on waste heat harvesting. To that aim, we gather experimentalists and theoreticians who work on the same systems, and who probe simultaneously the physical chemistry of the interfaces as well as their transport properties. This strategy opens the way to find optimal situations where reactive interfaces have a large impact on nanofluidic energy conversion.

This project is hosted by the Institute of Light and Matter - a joint research unit of the CNRS and the University of Lyon 1, and funded by the french national research agency.